GENEVA – On Sept. 14, Geneva Middle School South seventh-graders shipped seven large, flat-rate shipping boxes full of writing and drawing supplies to the children of Afghanistan.

It took only three days for the 125 students in South’s “7 White” team to amass hundreds of donated pencils, pencil sharpeners, pens, and small notepads to ship to the Middle East.

Dr. Vicky Tusken, a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Geneva Middle School South, said the donations came in response to a call from a former Geneva Middle School student, Alex Meade, a specialist in the U.S. Army currently serving in Afghanistan.

In a recent phone conversation, Meade told Tusken that when he and his fellow soldiers are on patrol, the Afghan children come out to greet them and hang out with them.

The children always ask the soldiers for pens, pencils and pieces of paper to write and draw with, he said, as most of the families are poor and do not have those items.

The items donated by the Geneva Middle School South students were shipped to Meade on Sept. 14 and are expected to arrive in Afghanistan in approximately three weeks to be handed out to children by the soldiers.